The Dilemma of Syria’s Alawites

One evening in September, I sat in a small café in East Beirut with Farid, a Syrian Alawite who had recently arrived from the war-ravaged northern city of Homs. It was a rare opportunity: Lebanon is awash with refugees from the civil war, but the Alawites—a small Shiite sect that counts Syria’s President, Bashar Assad, among its members—tend to keep a low profile. Since the start of the uprising, two and a half years ago, Syria’s two million Alawites have borne the brunt of the opposition’s fury, for obvious reasons: though they make up only about ten per cent of the country’s population, Alawites disproportionally occupy positions of power in government and business, and they constitute the core of the regime’s support. They are also among its most brutal enforcers: some of the worst atrocities of the conflict have been committed by the shabiha, freewheeling armed gangs of largely Alawite thugs.

As the international community attempts to steer Syria toward a political resolution to its deadly crisis, much of the focus has fallen on what it will take to sideline the extremists in the opposition and to bring the rebels to the negotiating table. But it may be equally difficult to convince the Alawites to let up their fight, given that many of them fear a negotiated end to the war would be a prelude to their extermination. What motivates the staunch Alawite support for the regime remains poorly understood, but it is typically characterized in monolithic and myopic terms: the Alawites, it is said, back the regime because they are the regime; its demise would be their own. But the Alawites’ support for Assad is much more complex—and harder to break.

Farid is thirty-four years old, with lanky arms and a long, sullen face. (I agreed to change the names of the Alawites quoted here so that they could speak candidly without endangering themselves or their families.) For two years, he strived to stay out of the conflict raging around him, which proved easier than one might expect. While the regime mercilessly bombarded rebel-held areas in major cities like Homs, reducing many of them to rubble, Alawite neighborhoods were left conspicuously untouched, their citizens urged to carry on some semblance of their normal lives. But when the rebels began to gain strength in the north, earlier this year, capturing wide swaths of territory and targeting Alawite civilians along the way, Farid watched his friends and relatives take up arms. “In my neighborhood, just about everyone is either in the Army or the National Defense Forces,” he said, referring to the semiofficial, pro-regime Alawite militias that have proliferated in the past year.

Farid is no supporter of the regime. “I don’t like Bashar Assad,” he said, as he swirled the dregs of cold coffee around in his cup. “In fact, I hate him. He is the one who put the Alawites into this situation.” But as the war crept closer, he also realized that he would be thrust into the fight no matter what he did. “If I was kidnapped by the Free Syrian Army, they would kill me for simply being an Alawite,” he said. “No one would care about my opinion.” Faced with a choice between enduring a rebel onslaught or taking up arms to defend a government he no longer supported, Farid made what seemed like the only logical move: he fled to Lebanon.

The community Farid left behind, at least as he and other young Alawites describe it, is more fearful and isolated than has been commonly understood. Though they are often portrayed as diehard Assad partisans, the Alawites I spoke to, in Lebanon and inside Syria (via Skype), described support for the regime among their friends as fairly limited and largely transactional: for one thing, many Alawites are poor, and the military provides reliable income and food. “In my opinion, ninety per cent of Alawites join the Army for economic reasons, not because they love Bashar or because they love Syria,” Saleh, a thirty-three-year-old Alawite from Homs, told me over Skype late one night, from an Internet café near his house.

It is not common to regard the Alawites as a disenfranchised minority detached from the regime, but that is increasingly how they view themselves. “The portrait of Alawites is that we have all this power, but I don’t have any power,” Saleh said. “I don’t get anything out of all this fighting.” Indeed, as the fortune of Homs’s Alawite community began to turn, Saleh suggested, the government often seemed to look the other way. “A few weeks ago, there was a huge explosion in my neighborhood,” he said. “No one from the regime came to the families to offer them help, or to ask what they needed. Because of this, we feel that we are just the front line, we are fighting just to protect the regime, because we have no choice. It’s a terrible situation.”

As the fighting dragged on, this sense of resentment only deepened, convincing many Alawites, particularly those in the more impoverished inland areas, that they were tools of the regime rather than its beneficiaries. But their bitterness about the Assad’s decision to put them at the vanguard of the war has been tempered by an even more powerful sentiment: fear. The opposition to the regime, too, is hardly monolithic, with its own share of moderates and those disaffected with the fighting altogether. At the same time, the rise of radical Islamist elements among the rebel forces has fulfilled the most anxious prophecies in the Alawite community (and, some say, the cynical plotting of the Assad regime). Retribution has arrived in the form of gangs of rebel fighters—some affiliated with jihadist groups that have been designated as terrorist organizations by the West—who have sowed carnage in Alawite regions as they conquered them. Last week, Human Rights Watch released a report documenting the murder of some two hundred civilians by rebel groups in Alawite areas, which it deemed a war crime. Farid referred specifically to a story from last year, in which a father in the town of Akrab, near Homs, was said to have murdered his own daughters and then killed himself as a group of Sunni vigilantes approached, in order to prevent them being kidnapped and raped by the mob. The story, perhaps apocryphal, has circulated widely among his friends and family, Farid said—and many of them now say they would do the same thing to their own kin should the jihadists arrive in Homs. “That’s what scares me,” he said.

“When we talk about the Alawites, the first thing we naturally think of is the regime, and that Bashar Assad is an Alawite, and so the fight must be about solidarity with the regime,” Aziz Nakkash, a Syrian researcher who recently published a paper about the Alawites for the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, told me when we spoke in Beirut. “But when you look inside the community, what you see is a series of personal choices. People fight because they lost a family member, or because they need the money, or—even if they don’t like fighting or the regime—because they are afraid for their own survival. It’s all about survival—for themselves and for their family, not for the sect.” Or, as Farid put it, “They want something that will give them an assurance that they and their children will not get killed—and then they will leave Bashar. But no one can give them this. So, for now, they will not leave him.”

Late last month, I spoke by Skype with Louay, a twenty-five-year-old Alawite from Homs. An engineering student, Louay struck me as urbane and gentle, and no fan of Syria’s dictatorship. (His Skype profile picture shows him in an expensive puffy winter coat, delicately smoking a cigarette.) When protests first broke out in the Sunni neighborhood near his home, he said, he felt optimistic. “We saw Tahrir Square in Egypt. It had a great image in Syria—it had a great effect on all of us.” But he never crossed town to join in the protests. Instead, he listened to the growing strains of sectarianism in the chants, and absorbed the “collective feeling” among Alawites that they would be targeted alongside the regime.

Since then, he’s heard constantly about the terrors committed by Sunni radicals in the opposition, and he has lost friends to the war (“Am I better than they are?”). Now, he told me with a soft-spoken certainty, he expects to join the military once he finishes his studies. “I can’t believe that Alawites are fighting just to defend Bashar,” he said. “But we’ve come to a situation where we feel like we have to fight to defend our way of life.”

Photograph: Andrea Bruce/NOOR

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